The Nuclear or “Nuke” icon has not only become a symbol for radiation, it is also communicates a general meaning of danger, “radical” ideas and “hot” concepts worthy of attention. Hence, they are used in many types of designs including printed designs for posters, catalog printing, flyer printing and booklets.

Now, there are tons of free pictures of nuke icons on the Internet, but in most cases these are rendered in pixels and are not easily scalable. In this guide, we will teach you the easy steps in creating your own Vector nuke icon for use in your own designs. The best part of this is that you can easily scale, manipulate and customize these steps for your purpose, applying them to different themes and uses. So just follow the instructions below and you will see how easy it is.

1. First, open a new document in illustrator. You will have a choice of course for the dimensions of your document as well as your resolution. Choose from the various templates that you have available or enter the values as you see fit. Make sure though that you use 300ppi resolution if you are going to use this icon for print, and 72ppi resolution for web use.

2. Now, click on the rectangle tool in your tools panel.

3. Create a fairly tall and thin rectangle in your canvass like so.

4. Now, go to Effects -> Warp -> Arc.

5. Use an arc style with a horizontal orientation. Make sure to use a 50% value in the bend slider. Click on the preview checkbox to see if you got the warp bend right. Just adjust the bend value as necessary for your custom nuke icon. Click on OK once done.

6. Now, to finalize the warp shape, just go to Object ->Expand Appearance. This should turn the warp effect into our own permanent shape.

7. Next, we will create the other “fan” shape for our nuke icon. Do this by selecting the rotate tool first in the tools panel.

8. Now click on a point a little bit below your initial shape. This will be the rotation point.

9. Hold down the ALT key and then drag the initial shape downwards, rotating along the pivot point we created. Position this one third of the way across our supposed arc. This should give us another part of the fan for the nuke icon.

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